Is it just me or is the new ACR heavily desaturating the highlight zones even in pictures where the highlights are held? It's killing my facial tones compared to the previous 2010 processing including when doing direct swap overs using the (!) tool on the image. The foreheads and noses, i.e. the highlighted area are suddenly going desaturated, losing colour but the non higher end highlights are not being touched. Again this is without touching the highlight control even. I don't have the new LR for a direct comparison to see if it's the 2012 processing period.

Go to the snapshots. First is the original as I had processed it and given it to the client a year back with process 2010, the old one. Second is the exact result of clicking the (!) icon at the bottom of the image, a supposedly direct conversion. Third snapshot is the conversion with the brightness and WB normalized somewhat.

If you look at the image at the left side of the face, especially at the temples, cheeks near the ear and neck, you can see the problem. With process 2012 the dress is of course substantially better but the at the expense of the highlights in the face which are desaturated and grey.

I know that 2012 is the future and what it can do for keeping a white dress in check is amazing. The extra tools in the 'Local Adjustments' are wonderful. I just want to work out this problem and my changeover to ACR7 will be pretty much complete.

Second is the exact result of clicking the (!) icon at the bottom of the image, a supposedly direct conversion.

There is no "direct conversion"...the conversion from PV 2010 to PV 2012 is an approximation and will never be exact because the algorithms being used in PV 2012 are too different. As a result, it's not at all unusual to have to tweak the post PV 2012 conversion. That's to be expected because the adjustments are different. If you find you can't get exactly what you want with PV 2012, consider keeping the image in PV 2010 and consider it done. In any event, I would not suggest doing a conversion from PV 2010 to PV 2012 en mass..BTW, you'll note that PV 2012 can get a lot more textural detail out of your shot...

Ben, I downloaded the file and played with it. I was able to get much better results with 2012. Try this Exp. .63, Highlights -100, shadow 49, whites -24, black -50 and vibrance about 40. This was based on your 2012 conversion. I know the numbers above seem counter intuitive but they work for me. I find 2012 to have much more power than 2010. If you don't overexpose you won't have to go through these gyrations.

Firstly many thanks for your effort! That's not true though, this image is not overexposed in the face and neck in the 2010 version even. This is just a sample image, I'm seeing it in any image where the facial tones are ending up in the top right square of the curves box. I'm also noticing that the color casts due to lighting is disappearing in the dress, it's nice not to have to deal with it but it's not accurate either. Your version is showing the grey in the highlight zones which just isn't there in the 2010 version, I'm losing the color. That's even after you've pumped a whole lot of vibrance into the image which will of course effect the accuracy of the non highlight areas of the image as it has done in this one. Even after pumping in the saturation you haven't recovered the color in those highlight zones. It's like the recovery tool used to be, replace overexposure with grey but now it's doing it, albeit very subtely, with the highlight spectrum, not just the blown areas.

I made virtual copies of each version and compared them at 100% in LR (high end, calibrated monitor). I see very little difference in the high skin tones, certainly not gray. Perhaps the conversion to jpg and viewing on the web is giving the result you describe. I don't see your problem.

I don't understand why so many people are having a hard time with 2012. To me it seems quite logical and easy to use. Natural aversion to change?

I like it a lot actually, very logically sorted out, I was up and working in seconds and the highlight rentention is incredible, ditto the local adjustment brushes which are heaven to use. The only minor niggles I'm having to get used to is moving the mouse to the top of the sliders to get started rather than automatically to the brighness control as my starting point after so many years of doing it the latter way! and trying to work out how the new blacks/shadow control works given that they are both way way more subtle than they used to be and the controls max out far earlier.

Perhaps I'm being more particular about the skin tones? I'm a wedding shooter by profession so they are very important to me. However you are having to do a lot of work in your conversion to reach what IMO (I of course applied your changes to the raw, didn't trust the jpg, using a calibrated NEC P221W) is still losing color in the highlights compared to the previous versions. Desaturated in the highlights.

Here is another example bride. Two snapshots included. Look at the highlight above the right eye. It gets desaturated out to almost grey with 2012. You can do as much minus settings on the highlights or whites in 2012, it never recovers the colour of the 2010 version. The recovery slider in 2010 used to do this and as such was pretty much useless.

Hi Ben, I spent 30 years in the trenches as a wedding photographer in the Chicago north shore area. Retired from that about 10 years ago so I missed the digital revolution in wedding photography. Got too old to handle the load.

There has got to be something going on at your end because I am not seeing a graying of highlights in your examples. I see good color and saturation in both examples. Those are specular highlights on her forehead and no amount of recovery will help. If the image were important, I would take it into Photoshop and dust down the highlights a little with a very low (couple of percent set on mode darken) opacity stamp brush sampling from a nearby skin tone. It has to be done very judiciously or it does not look good. Do it on a separate layer so that you can reduce the layers opacity until it looks right. As a rule of thump, I find that when I do corrections of this kind, I end up reducing the opacity of the layer in the 70% range. It looks ok when I working on it, but on further reflection and viewing at reduced size brings the opacity down. I know that it is not always possible in the heat of battle, but she sure could have used some face powder.

Larry, you were well out of it in the wedding field for digital. I started weddings with film and was an early convert to digital but the business has changed so much and so fast and it's very very tough out there these days. I'm winding down the business now to be honest, taking high end gigs only now even if it only means some 15 weddings a year. Got a side job running a big repro lab for a museum using a MFDB so I can afford to put bread on the table and doing some teaching as well.

I'm seeing the specular/highlights in the faces retain much more detail and more importantly colour with the 2010 version, they are higher contrast and desaturated in the newer version. Bothering me a lot. I really want 2012 to work...

I must be looking at the front end of an elephant and you the rear cause I see the opposite. 2012 rocks!

I'll send you my version of the file that you sent me but right now my main computer is in a semi down state as I rebuild a drive.

I did relatively high end weddings and was at the major Chicago hotels a lot as well as many of the exclusive north shore country clubs. It was fun for awhile but at the end became a drag. I follow some wedding forums just for giggles. Yes digital sure has changed things. I almost always worked alone and most new guys have assistants - that would have been nice. For awhile there the new guys were knocking all the cliches that us oldsters did, you know the inset wine glass and so on. I hate to tell them that what they are doing now will be tomorrows cliches. In fact some of what was popular a couple of years ago is already a cliche - the extreme tilt. The next cliche will be be the shift lens out of focus shots.

In a way, we had it better with film. The expectations were not so high. Everyone knew you could not take photos in near dark or action available light at the ceremony so we did not have to do it. We had a good excuse - "it is not possible with today's cameras." Now a days people expect that you can do anything so you had better be able to do it.

Ben,I am not seeing the greying that you show in your PSD with the sample image, and that includes making some pretty radical adjustments with exposure, contrast, highlights, and even clarity.What camera profile are you using?